This volume brings together exciting and provocative new feminist readings of famous classic and contemporary texts from Plato to Rawls. The feminist scholars focus on neglected arguments and silences in the texts and raise fundamentally important questions about the significance of sexual difference in the great works of political theory. A wide diversity of feminist approaches and theoretical frameworks are represented, forming a rich variety of interpretations and argument about such questions as the patriarchal construction of central political categories, the relation between public and private life, and the problem of equality and difference, including differences among women.

Mary Lyndon Shanley is a feminist legal scholar specializing in issues of the American family and reproductive technologies. Her book Just Marriage weighed into the controversy around gay marriage with a historical and political science perspective.

Carole Pateman is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007.